The demand for high data rate transmission continues to increase. As a result, data signals are being transmitted at very high data rates such as in the gigabit per second range. Such high data rate transmissions are subject to significant levels of distortion. This makes recovering transmitted signals extremely difficult.
Inter-symbol interference (ISI) is a well-known phenomenon that deteriorates signal integrity by reducing the timing and voltage margin of received signals. Inter-symbol interference is generally caused by limitations in the channel bandwidth. To reduce inter-symbol interference on high-speed channels, many transceiver systems use well-known pre-emphasis techniques at the transmitting system or well-known equalization techniques at the receiving system.